Painting in Progress

(Detail.)

(10/18/09)

(10/11/09)

(09/07/09)

"As the Heart Finds the Good Thing, the Feeling is Multiplied"
Acrylic, Prismacolor, and graphite on canvas
October, 2009

The title of this piece is borrowed from "The Good Thing" by the Talking Heads. All I really do is borrow. The kids in this painting were all in the local newspaper. The towers in the background and the figures in the door are from an illuminated manuscript. I select, I assimilate, and I assemble. There is no real plan to it, I just wait for the right elements to come along, which is why this piece took so long to complete.
Painting as a response to external stimuli is nothing new, but it is indispensable to the painter. I am not the first to say that I enjoy arranging more than creating but I find it to be true. When I had to describe this piece to someone yesterday without being able to show it to them, all I could really do was list the ingredients- as for the composition itself, I was at a loss for words.

Hell Yeah, Spocktober!

Happy that it's Spocktober again? I sure am.

I know I spelled the word 'missile' wrong. Don't bother pointing it out. This isn't a fucking spelling bee.
Mind the braintrust. I won't tell you whose brain it is they've got in that jar. They're just no good. Avoid them.

media: ink, watercolor, colored pencil, acrylic
surface: vellum Bristol
2009

Sketchbook page detail

Let's see if I can manage more than two goddamn posts this month. Sheesh! I'm not such a good blogger, I guess. Whatever.

"Grandpa's Back From Outer Space!"
Collage, acrylic, colored pencil on cardboard.
2009

"Like The Taste of Venison"

Collage, acrylic, colored pencil on cardboard.
2009

Unintentional Flying Objects

"Unintentional Flying Objects"
digital collage, 2009.

The Redneck Riviera!

Summer is here in full force! I mean it is really freaking hot outside! When I was a lad, my family used to escape the New Orleans heat and humidity and head to the Gulf coast, or as some affectionately call it, The Redneck Riviera.
New Orleans is located in the south, but it is not culturally typical of a southern city. Places we used to visit like Biloxi, Mobile, or my favorite, Panama City, Fla, really are southern cities, culturally speaking. These were the places we would visit where the locals would remark to us in their thick southern drawls: "Ya'll talk funny."
The three Polaroids above are putt-putt courses from Panama City Beach. I had no interest whatsoever in playing the game. I only wanted to see the plaster dinosaurs that adorned the course, much to the chagrin of my family and miniature gulf enthusiasts who just wanted that annoying little kid to stop blocking the holes.
After I threw many a tantrum to get the over-priced rubber dinosaurs and monsters that were sold in the gift shop, we would leave such places and dip in the clear green waters of the Gulf of Mexico, all the while keeping an eye open for the occasional stingray or jellyfish. Lots of people want to go to Pensacola or Destin, and while those places might have pretty beaches, Panama City has more amusement parks, putt-putt courses, and other tourist traps in addition to public beaches.
My last visit at 21 killed the romance, however. The water was all full of thick green seaweed that looked like spinach and smelled like briny rotten eggs. The only clear water was at an over-crowded jetty, and it was freezing cold. Not only that, but I had clearly out-grown all of the junk that used to fascinate me as a kid. In recent years, Miracle Strip Amusement Park , a major attraction in Panama City closed down. I guess it's the same story pretty much everywhere else in America.
Here in New Orleans, we do have Lake Pontchartrain, which was re-opened to swimmers a couple years back, but you still might come out of the water with a thick, chitinous shell forming over your genitals. I wouldn't recommend it.

Saturday!

With the recent passing of The King of Pop, we lose an important icon from the decade of my childhood, the 1980's. I have a love/hate relationship with the 80's. I love them because Jeanne was born in 1982; because I had some pretty respectable collections of Lego, M.U.S.C.L.E. , Transformers, and Masters of the Universe toys; and also because in 1987, I first started collecting comic books, a hobby that would continue until 2002, thus stunting my development as a productive member of society.
But I also hate lots of things about the 80's. Even as a child, I used to hate the way people looked back then. Everything was ridiculously ugly, all poofy and pastel. I hated a lot of the popular music of the time (I had no way of listening to punk and all that stuff) , and while I did enjoy watching Michael Jackson videos on MTV, exposure to all of the cheesy hair metal like Poison and soft-rock wussies like Richard Marx used to make me hate music altogether.
Cold War paranoia was still going on, and along with other Reagan-wrought propaganda like "The War on Drugs", there was a lot to scare little kids. Add this to my being in Catholic school for most of the decade, my parents divorcing, living on government cheese for a couple years, and my uncle killing himself, and you might understand why the 80's were not my favorite decade.
There were things that sucked about the 90's too, of course, but I always felt like that was my decade. I was comfortable with the way things looked and sounded back then, and it was a noticeable change around 1989 when the Soviet Union broke up and the Berlin Wall came down. I was too young to really understand the politics behind the first Gulf War, and was too interested in comics, girls, and Nintendo to care much about anything else. Most of what I knew about the world came from Mad Magazine.

That's why I say that the 80's are like the new 60's, because retro style just works that way. You don't want things to be the way they were when your parents came of age, because after all, they are the people who fucked you up! So you look to the decade before your parents were your age, and marvel at how awesome things seemed then. That's what we did as young people in the 90's, and that will be what the youth of the 2010's are going to do.

But then, what do I know? I just run off at the keyboard sometimes...